Executive Directors Corner Spring 2024

As you can see by the 2023 “numbers” EPIC ‘Ohana was quite busy in 2023. A large decline in the number of children taken into care was a big shift for child welfare in 2023. CWS has worked hard to prevent removals and provide other services to families to stabilize them. Our efforts have also shifted a bit to reach out to families early in CWS involvement. Also, with Family Wrap Hawai‘i, our work with family teams and with parent and youth peer support provides support so that families are successful after reunification, or after permanent placement.

Mālama ‘Ohana Working Group is hard at work reaching out to individuals with lived experience, community members and professionals to prepare a report of recommendations to the 2025 legislature. Watch for dates and locations for the community sessions that will be held on each island in late May through June.

The search for the next Executive Director is going well with a good number of applications receiving a first review by the search firm Inkinen. A first round of interviews will take place in late April, and we hope to finalize the search process by the end of May. In preparing for the transition, I have been organizing and archiving our history and records. EPIC was founded in January 1998, and in our board book we have the first few board minutes documenting meetings at a coffee shop in Makiki.

We lost one of our first board members Peter Lewis, late last year. We are very grateful to Peter’s family for directing donations to charitable organizations including EPIC. We are deeply grateful to each of you for your contributions to our work. We believe that respectful, collaborative processes can help strengthen our families, ourselves, and our communities.

Aloha

Laurie